Game #34: Call of Duty Black Ops 3

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Platform: PS4
Duration: 7 Hours

So some people still call me a masochist, but I continue to play through the campaign for every Call of Duty. It's a franchise I have worked personally on, so I feel it almost as an obligation to see how my kid has grown up. I touch base every year to see what sort of life choices it has been making for itself. Well if Black Ops 3 was my son, he would be a 19 year old wandering around Europe for a summer, trying to find itself. I hope my boy gains a sense of identity soon, because I had precisely zero fucking clue what was happening.

I don't know who I work for. I don't know who I am fighting. The game throws acronyms for organizations at me left and right without explaining what they mean or why I should care. It seriously got to the point where I was making up my own names and backstory. There was one group called the "Winslow Accord" that I was convinced was just a peace treaty brokered by the actor that played Carl Winslow in Family Matters.

One minute it's all future battlefields with robots and smart weapons, then I'm inside my own head, then someone else's head, then it's fucking World War 2 because we haven't done that in a while, then it's the original zombies level in the middle of a campaign mission. Like, please CoD, stop for a second. Breathe. Figure out what story you want to tell instead of vomiting visuals at me. This didn't even feel like a Black Ops campaign. I counted, there were precisely two connections to the previous games that I came across:

The badguy from BO2 was mentioned in passing once.
NOVA6 gas shows up and the threat is removed TWO MINUTES after it appears.

That's it. No Mason. No numbers. Just some snowy forest and robots.

Me ranting about the story aside (sorry, Black Ops 1 was my favorite campaign and I was disappointed to see it fall so hard) I did want to mention the gameplay itself. Gunplay is still top notch, and I enjoyed the addition of a custom character and the level up system in single player. The cybernetic abilities were overpowered to shit though. Those silly fire bees pretty much won me every encounter. It was by far the easiest Hardened playthrough I've done.

There is a lot of game in this box, and while MP isn't my thing, Zombies was still fun to dick around in and I did enjoy shooting things with my robot arms in campaign. I just might be the only person in the world who still hopes for a good CoD story. If you just want to fight off waves of enemies until you move forward to trigger the script to spawn the next wave, you will still have fun.